Steven Spielberg

He may not have won the Oscar for Lincoln but being named president of this year's Competition jury is a classy consolation prize. Spielberg's underlings have yet to be announced but you can expect the usual quota of one huge Hollywood star, one auteur only the most cinephilic have heard of and at least two women. Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) chairs the panel for the Un Certain Regard sidebar; Jane Campion wields the gavel over on the Cinéfondation wing.

Bruce Dern

The heavy of credible American cinema (as well as dad of Laura) takes his first serious starring role in years in Nebraska, Alexander Payne's follow-up to The Descendants. Nebraska looks like a splice of that film (George Clooney family saga) and Payne's previous, Sideways (ill-fated vineyard holiday) – it's a father/son road trip with the booze-addled Dern driving from Montana to Nebraska with estranged offspring (Saturday Night Live regular Will Forte) on the trail of a million-dollar prize.

Audrey Tautou

Twelve years on from Amélie, the gamine Gallic actor has been named host of the opening and closing bashes. It's traditional that these are fronted by someone with good language skills, a background in acting and drop-dead gorgeous cheekbones. Last year The Artist star Bérénice Béjo was emcee (this time round she's starring in the latest from A Separation director Asghar Farhadi). How long before Olga Kurylenko gets the call?

Marion Cotillard

Her fateful encounter with a killer whale in Jacques Audiard's Rust & Bone made a splash here last year but didn't, in the end, bring home the awards bacon. This time she has one film in competition (James Gray's The Immigrant, in which she plays a 1920s Ellis Island burlesque artist) and one out of the running, Blood Ties (organised crime in 1970s Brooklyn), the English-language debut of her actor/director partner, Guillaume Canet.

Michael Douglas

Buzz from early screenings of Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, has been ecstatic, and Oscars are already being touted for Douglas – as the ageing pianist – as well as Matt Damon (his young lover) and Rob Lowe (insane agent).

James Gray

What the competition lacks in Brits (for the first time in five years, we've no one in the running) it makes up for in US auteurs – Soderbergh, Payne, the Coens. The least starry of these is Gray, a 44-year-old from Queens. Both his fifth and sixth films in a 20-year career are at Cannes this May: The Immigrant, which he's directed, and Blood Ties, which he's written.

Carey Mulligan

Mulligan is Daisy in opening-night film The Great Gatsby, before returning as the love interest in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, set in the 1960s New York folk scene.

Stephen Frears

The full weight of homegrown hopes lies on the redoubtable shoulders of Stephen Frears, 71, whose drama about the US government's anger at Muhammad Ali is the sole UK feature at Cannes this year, as a "special screening". Fingers crossed its quality means we're at least punching above our weight.

Ryan Gosling

Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives will further fan a flame of global lust for Gosling after this month's release of The Place Beyond the Pines.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi

Sister to Carla, sister-in-law to Nicolas Sarkozy, partner of Louis Garrell – she is "royalty" across the channel. Her third film as director makes her the only woman in the running for this year's Palme d'Or.